Perfidia


Judith Rossner - 1997
    Sexually voracious and dangerously self-absorbed, Anita Stern competes with the teenage Maddy over everything--achievements, looks, even men. With Maddy's affair with the seductive Geraldo, the threatened loss of control over the Santa Fe art gallery Anita has built up, and Maddy's planned departure for college, their home becomes a battleground that explodes into violence--and death.This is Judith Rossner's tenth novel and the first, since "Looking for Mr. Goodbar, " in which she has dealt with those forces in "ordinary" people that are so dark as to lead them to murder. Smart, desperately funny and shockingly real, "Perfidia" is simply impossible to put down.

The Guilty Heart


Julie Parsons - 2003
    Everyone had thought that he was out playing with his best friend Luke. But later it turned out that Owen had left him in the middle of the afternoon. And never made it home. He vanished leaving no trace, except for a trainer found in a rubbish bin two weeks later.... His disappearance left his father, Nick, distraught, but also full of guilt. For instead of looking after Owen that day, Nick had spent the afternoon in bed-with one of their neighbours. It was an affair that would tear his family apart. The aftermath of Owen's disappearance drove Nick away from his wife and home, to America. He has moved from city to city, trying to forget. But it is impossible to run away from a guilty heart. Now, ten years on, a sudden encounter forces Nick to return to Dublin to confront his demons. He arrives to find the world has moved on. But he is determined to face up to his past, and to find out at last exactly what happened to his son. Little does he realise that his investigations will soon unleash further violence, taking him into a terrifying world that he barely knew existed.

Self Portrait


Lee Friedlander - 1992
    Here Friedlander focuses on the role of his own physical presence in his images. He writes: "At first, my presence in my photos was fascinating and disturbing. But as time passed and I was more a part of other ideas in my photos, I was able to add a giggle to those feelings." Here readers can witness this progression as Friedlander appears in the form of his shadow, or reflected in windows and mirrors, and only occasionally fully visible through his own camera. In some photos he visibly struggles with the notion of self-portraiture, desultorily shooting himself in household mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Soon, though, he begins to toy with the pictures, almost teasingly inserting his shadow into them to amusing and provocative effect--elongated and trailing a group of women seen only from the knees down; cast and bent over a chair as if seated in it; mirroring the silhouette of someone walking down the street ahead of him; or falling on the desert ground, a large bush standing in for hair. These uncanny self-portraits evoke a surprisingly full landscape of the artist's life and mind. This reprint edition of Lee Friedlander: Self Portrait contains nearly 50 duotone images and an afterword by John Szarkowski, former Director of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art.